The Ego and His Own: The Case of the Individual Against Authority

by Max Stirner

God and mankind have concerned themselves for nothing, for nothing but themselves. Let me then likewise concern myself for myself, who am equally with God the nothing of all others, who am my all, who am the only one.23

The former does not try to get hold of things (for instance, to get into his head the data of history), but of the thoughts that lie hidden in things, and so, therefore, of the spirit of history. On the other hand, the boy understands connections no doubt, but not ideas, the spirit; therefore he strings together whatever can be learned, without proceeding a priori and theoretically, without looking for ideas.

In MBTIspeak, N supercedes S.

Not till one has fallen in love with his corporeal self, and takes a pleasure in himself as a living flesh-and-blood person—but it is in mature years, in the man, that we find it so—not till then has one a personal or egoistic interest, an interest not only of our spirit, for instance, but of total satisfaction, satisfaction of the whole chap, a selfish interest.

In the time of spirits thoughts grew till they overtopped my head, whose offspring they yet were; they hovered about me and convulsed me like fever-phantasies—an awful power. The thoughts had become corporeal on their own account, were ghosts, such as God, Emperor, Pope, Fatherland, etc. If I destroy their corporeity, then I take them back into mine, and say: “I alone am corporeal.” And now I take the world as what it is to me, as mine, as my property; I refer all to myself.

We know, of course, the revolutionary innovator and disrespectful heir, who even took away the sanctity of the fathers’ sabbath to hallow his Sunday, and interrupted the course of time to begin at himself with a new chronology; we know him, and know that it is—the Christian. But does he remain forever young, and is he to-day still the new man, or will he too be superseded, as he has superseded the “ancients”?

Daily experience confirms the truth that the understanding may have renounced a thing many years before the heart has ceased to beat for it.

To have a liking for the corporeal man with hide and hair —why, that would no longer be a “spiritual” warm-heartedness, it would be treason against “pure” warm-heartedness, the “theoretical regard.” For pure warm-heartedness is by no means to be conceived as like that kindliness that gives everybody a friendly hand-shake; on the contrary, pure warm-heartedness is warmhearted toward nobody, it is only a theoretical interest, concern for man as man, not as a person. The person is repulsive to it because of being “egoistic,” because of not being that abstraction, Man. But it is only for the abstraction that one can have a theoretical regard. To pure warm-heartedness or pure theory men exist only to be criticized, scoffed at, and thoroughly despised; to it, no less than to the fanatical parson, they are only “filth” and other such nice things.

Jews of the true metal,

🤘🏿

If somebody told you you were altogether spirit, you would take hold of your body and not believe him, but answer: “I have a spirit, no doubt, but do not exist only as spirit, but as a man with a body.” You would still distinguish yourself from “your spirit.”

Despite all your atheism, in zeal against egoism you concur with the believers in immortality.

I am neither God nor Man,43 neither the supreme essence nor my essence, and therefore it is all one in the main whether I think of the essence as in me or outside me. Nay, we really do always think of the supreme being as in both kinds of otherworldliness, the inward and outward, at once; for the “Spirit of God” is, according to the Christian view, also “our spirit,” and “dwells in us.”44 It dwells in heaven and dwells in us; we poor things are just its “dwelling,” and, if Feuerbach goes on to destroy its heavenly dwelling and force it to move to us bag and baggage, then we, its earthly apartments, will be badly overcrowded.

If by revealed we understand only the so-called religious truths, we go far astray, and entirely fail to recognize the breadth of the concept “higher being.” Atheists keep up their scoffing at the higher being, which was also honored under the name of the “highest” or être suprême, and trample in the dust one “proof of his existence” after another, without noticing that they themselves, out of need for a higher being, only annihilate the old to make room for a new. Is “Man” perchance not a higher essence than an individual man, and must not the truths, rights, and ideas which result from the concept of him be honored and—counted sacred, as revelations of this very concept?

It is easily understood that the conflict over what is revered as the highest essence can be significant only so long as even the most embittered opponents concede to each other the main point —that there is a highest essence to which worship or service is due. If one should smile compassionately at the whole struggle over a highest essence, as a Christian might at the war of words between a Shiite and a Sunnite or between a Brahman and a Buddhist,53 then the hypothesis of a highest essence would be null in his eyes, and the conflict on this basis an idle play. Whether then the one God or the three in one, whether the Lutheran God or the être suprême or not God at all, but “Man,” may represent the highest essence, that makes no difference at all for him who denies the highest essence itself, for in his eyes those servants of a highest essence are one and all—pious people, the most raging atheist not less than the most faith-filled Christian.

To know and acknowledge essences alone and nothing but essences, that is religion; its realm is a realm of essences, spooks, and ghosts.

If I cherish you because I hold you dear, because in you my heart finds nourishment, my need satisfaction, then it is not done for the sake of a higher essence whose hallowed body you are, not on account of my beholding in you a ghost, an appearing spirit, but from egoistic pleasure; you yourself with your essence are valuable to me, for your essence is not a higher one, is not higher and more general than you, is unique57 like you yourself, because it is you.

And is the truth of the faith, say, which we are not to doubt; the majesty of the people, which we are not to strike at (he who does is guilty of—lese-majesty); virtue, against which the censor is not to let a word pass, that morality may be kept pure;—are these not “fixed ideas”? Is not all the stupid chatter of most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed idea of morality, legality, Christianity, and so forth, and only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space? Touch the fixed idea of such a fool, and you will at once have to guard your back against the lunatic’s stealthy malice. For these great lunatics are like the little so-called lunatics in this point too—that they assail by stealth him who touches their fixed idea. They first steal his weapon, steal free speech from him, and then they fall upon him with their nails. Every day now lays bare the cowardice and vindictiveness of these maniacs, and the stupid populace hurrahs for their crazy measures.

So then the religious heroes of faith are zealous for the “sacred God,” the moral ones for the “sacred good.”

To be sure, the heretic against pure faith no longer exposes himself to the earlier fury of persecution, but so much the more does it now fall upon the heretic against pure morals.

Moral people skimmed off the best fat from religion, ate it themselves, and are now having a tough job to get rid of the resulting scrofula.

To expel God from his heaven and to rob him of his “transcendence” cannot yet support a claim of complete victory, if therein he is only chased into the human breast and gifted with indelible immanence. Now they say, “The divine is the truly human!”

Nero was no viler than his time, in which one could only be one of the two, good or bad. The judgment of his time on him had to be that he was bad, and this in the highest degree: not a milksop, but an arch-scoundrel. All moral people can pronounce only this judgment on him. Rascals such as he was are still living here and there to-day (see for example the Memoirs of Ritter von Lang76) in the midst of the moral. It is not convenient to live among them certainly, as one is not sure of his life for a moment; but can you say that it is more convenient to live among the moral? One is just as little sure of his life there, only that one is hanged “in the way of justice,” but least of all is one sure of his honor, and the national cockade is gone before you can say Jack Robinson. The hard fist of morality treats the noble nature of egoism altogether without compassion.

Because this morality completed into humanity has fully settled its accounts with the religion out of which it historically came forth, nothing hinders it from becoming a religion on its own account. For a distinction prevails between religion and morality only so long as our dealings with the world of men are regulated and hallowed by our relation to a superhuman being, or so long as our doing is a doing “for God’s sake.” If, on the other hand, it comes to the point that “man is to man the supreme being,” then that distinction vanishes, and morality, being removed from its subordinate position, is completed into—religion.

Morality and piety are now as synonymous as in the beginning of Christianity, and it is only because the supreme being has come to be a different one that a holy walk is no longer called a “holy” one, but a “human” one. If morality has conquered, then a complete—change of masters has taken place.

Haven’t we the priest again there? Who is his God? Man with a great M! What is the divine? The human! Then the predicate has indeed only been changed into the subject, and, instead of the sentence “God is love,” they say “love is divine”; instead of “God has become man,” “Man has become God,” etc. It is nothing more or less than a new—religion.

I am not unselfish so long as the end remains my own, and I, instead of giving myself up to be the blind means of its fulfillment, leave it always an open question. My zeal need not on that account be slacker than the most fanatical, but at the same time I remain toward it frostily cold, unbelieving, and its most irreconcilable enemy; I remain its judge, because I am its owner.

it is only when a man hears his flesh along with the rest of him that he hears himself wholly, and it is only when he wholly hears himself that he is a hearing or rational91 being.

The difference is, then, whether feelings are imparted to me or only aroused. Those which are aroused are my own, egoistic, because they are not as feelings drilled into me, dictated to me, and pressed upon me; but those which are imparted to me I receive, with open arms—I cherish them in me as a heritage, cultivate them, and am possessed by them. Who is there that has never, more or less consciously, noticed that our whole education is calculated to produce feelings in us, impart them to us, instead of leaving their production to ourselves however they may turn out? If we hear the name of God, we are to feel veneration; if we hear that of the prince’s majesty, it is to be received with reverence, deference, submission; if we hear that of morality, we are to think that we hear something inviolable; if we hear of the Evil One or evil ones, we are to shudder. The intention is directed to these feelings, and he who should hear with pleasure the deeds of the “bad” would have to be “taught what’s what” with the rod of discipline.

We must not feel at every thing and every name that comes before us what we could and would like to feel thereat; at the name of God we must think of nothing laughable, feel nothing disrespectful, it being prescribed and imparted to us what and how we are to feel and think at mention of that name.

The Chinese are doubtless the most positive nation, because totally buried in precepts; but neither has the Christian age come out from the positive, from “limited freedom,” freedom “within certain limits.”

POZZED!

The Chinese are doubtless the most positive nation, because totally buried in precepts; but neither has the Christian age come out from the positive, from “limited freedom,” freedom “within certain limits.”

POZZED!

Through the heaven of culture man seeks to isolate himself from the world, to break its hostile power. But this isolation of heaven must likewise be broken, and the true end of heaven-storming is the—downfall of heaven, the annihilation of heaven.

Fear makes the beginning, and one can make himself fearful to the coarsest man; already, therefore, a barrier against his insolence. But in fear there always remains the attempt to liberate oneself from what is feared, by guile, deception, tricks, etc. In reverence,96 on the contrary, it is quite otherwise. Here something is not only feared,97 but also honored:98 what is feared has become an inward power which I can no longer get clear of; I honor it, am captivated by it and devoted to it, belong to it; by the honor which I pay it I am completely in its power, and do not even attempt liberation any longer. Now I am attached to it with all the strength of faith; I believe. I and what I fear are one; “not I live, but the respected lives in me!”

Because the revolutionary priests or schoolmasters served Man, they cut off the heads of men. The revolutionary laymen, those outside the sacred circle, did not feel any greater horror of cutting off heads, but were less anxious about the rights of Man than about their own.

I can, no doubt, strive after rationality, I can love it, just as I can also love God and every other idea. I can be a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, as I love God. But what I love, what I strive for, is only in my idea, my conception, my thoughts; it is in my heart, my head, it is in me like the heart, but it is not I, I am not it.

If I call to some one to run away when a rock is to be blasted, I exert no moral influence by this demand; if I say to a child “You will go hungry if you will not eat what is put on the table,” this is not moral influence. But, if I say to it, “You will pray, honor your parents, respect the crucifix, speak the truth, for this belongs to man and is man’s calling,” or even “this is God’s will,” then moral influence is complete; then a man is to bend before the calling of man, be tractable, become humble, give up his will for an alien one which is set up as rule and law; he is to abase himself before something higher: self-abasement. “He that abaseth himself shall be exalted.”

If one shrugs his shoulders at this, at once the good wring their hands despairingly, and cry: “But, for heaven’s sake, if one is to give children no good instruction, why, then they will run straight into the jaws of sin, and become good-for-nothing hoodlums!” Gently, you prophets of evil. Good-for-nothing in your sense they certainly will become; but your sense happens to be a very good-for-nothing sense. The impudent lads will no longer let anything be whined and chattered into them by you, and will have no sympathy for all the follies for which you have been raving and driveling since the memory of man began; they will abolish the law of inheritance; they will not be willing to inherit your stupidities as you inherited them from your fathers; they destroy inherited sin.106 If you command them, “Bend before the Most High,” they will answer: “If he wants to bend us, let him come himself and do it; we, at least, will not bend of our own accord.”

Because Protestantism broke the medieval hierarchy, the opinion could take root that hierarchy in general had been shattered by it, and it could be wholly overlooked that it was precisely a “reformation,” and so a reinvigoration of the antiquated hierarchy.

For this very reason the name of philosopher is not to be given to him who has indeed open eyes for the things of the world, a clear and undazzled gaze, a correct judgment about the world, but who sees in the world just the world, in objects only objects, and, in short, everything prosaically as it is; but he alone is a philosopher who sees, and points out or demonstrates, heaven in the world, the supernal in the earthly, the—divine in the mundane.

On this ground Bacon was turned out of the realm of philosophers.

"Farewell, you damned Englishman!"

certainly what is called English philosophy seems to have got no further than to the discoveries of so-called “clear heads,” such as Bacon and Hume. The English did not know how to exalt the simplicity of the childlike heart to philosophic significance, did not know how to make—philosophers out of childlike hearts. This is as much as to say, their philosophy was not able to become theological or theology, and yet it is only as theology that it can really live itself out, complete itself. The field of its battle to the death is in theology. Bacon did not trouble himself about theological questions and cardinal points.

The decision having once been made not to let oneself be imposed on any longer by the extant and palpable, little scruple was felt about revolting against the existing State or overturning the existing laws; but to sin against the idea of the State, not to submit to the idea of law, who would have dared that? So one remained a “citizen” and a “law-respecting,” loyal man; yes, one seemed to himself to be only so much more law-respecting, the more rationalistically one abrogated the former defective law in order to do homage to the “spirit of the law.”

But around the altar rise the arches of a church, and its walls keep moving further and further out. What they enclose is sacred. You can no longer get to it, no longer touch it. Shrieking with the hunger that devours you, you wander round about these walls in search of the little that is profane, and the circles of your course keep growing more and more extended. Soon that church will embrace the whole world, and you be driven out to the extreme edge; another step, and the world of the sacred has conquered: you sink into the abyss. Therefore take courage while it is yet time, wander about no longer in the profane where now it is dry feeding, dare the leap, and rush in through the gates into the sanctuary itself. If you devour the sacred, you have made it your own! Digest the sacramental wafer, and you are rid of it!

Be rich as Croesus or poor as Job—the State of the commonalty leaves that to your option; but only have a “good disposition.” This it demands of you, and counts it its most urgent task to establish this in all. Therefore it will keep you from “evil promptings,” holding the “ill-disposed” in check and silencing their inflammatory discourses under censors’ canceling-marks or press-penalties and behind dungeon walls, and will, on the other hand, appoint people of “good disposition” as censors, and in every way have a moral influence exerted on you by “well-disposed and well-meaning” people. If it has made you deaf to evil promptings, then it opens your ears again all the more diligently to good promptings.

“Political liberty,” what are we to understand by that? Perhaps the individual’s independence of the State and its laws? No; on the contrary, the individual’s subjection in the State and to the State’s laws.

If the welfare of the State is the end, war is a hallowed means; if justice is the State’s end, homicide is a hallowed means, and is called by its sacred name, “execution”; the sacred State hallows everything that is serviceable to it.

The Revolution began in bourgeois fashion with the uprising of the third estate, the middle class; in bourgeois fashion it dries away. It was not the individual man—and he alone is Man—that became free, but the citizen, the citoyen, the political man, who for that very reason is not Man but a specimen of the human species, and more particularly a specimen of the species Citizen, a free citizen.

It is certainly not to be denied that my father begot me; but, now that I am once begotten, surely his purposes in begetting do not concern me a bit and, whatever he may have called me to, I do what I myself will.

If an age is imbued with an error, some always derive advantage from the error, while the rest have to suffer from it.

Now Communism responds: Our dignity and our essence consist not in our being all—the equal children of our mother, the State, all born with equal claim to her love and her protection, but in our all existing for each other. This is our equality, or herein we are equal, in that we, I as well as you and you and all of you, are active or “labor” each one for the rest; in that each of us is a laborer, then. The point for us is not what we are for the State (citizens), not our citizenship therefore, but what we are for each other, that each of us exists only through the other, who, caring for my wants, at the same time sees his own satisfied by me. He labors for my clothing (tailor), I for his need of amusement (comedy-writer, rope-dancer), he for my food (farmer), I for his instruction (scientist). It is labor that constitutes our dignity and our—equality.

That the Communist sees in you the man, the brother, is only the Sunday side of Communism. According to the work-day side he does not by any means take you as man simply, but as human laborer or laboring man. The first view has in it the liberal principle; in the second, illiberality is concealed. If you were a “lazybones,” he would not indeed fail to recognize the man in you, but would endeavor to cleanse him as a “lazy man” from laziness and to convert you to the faith that labor is man’s “destiny and calling.” Therefore he shows a double face: with the one he takes heed that the spiritual man be satisfied, with the other he looks about him for means for the material or corporeal man. He gives man a twofold post—an office of material acquisition and one of spiritual.